The Literary Conference

by Cesar Aira

  As a result, perfection has to find its own way. We can’t find perfection. The miracle is that it happens at all. Life is generous that way, it always is.

  If the preceding text were a riddle, I would not need to provide the answer, not even written upside down at the foot of this page, because any reader could have guessed it right away: love. Love, the portentous coincidence, the surprise, the flower of this world.

  Until now, I have been drawing a portrait of a character who represents me in more or less fair and realistic — even if partial — terms. Until now, he could have been taken for a cold, clear-headed scientist writing a well-reasoned memoir in which even emotions take on an icy edge . . . To complete the portrait, though, we would need to paint in a background of passion, so alive and excessive that it makes the rest tremble.

  It would be counterproductive to go into too many details, so I won’t. I know myself and I know that the triumph of my false modesty when I sit down to write would translate into such absurd fairy tales that I don’t know where it would end up. I’ll say only what’s most basic; better: I’ll sketch it out.

  Years ago, in this same city, at this same pool, I met a woman and fell in love with her. I couldn’t and didn’t want to commit myself, so I returned to Buenos Aires and my life there, but I couldn’t forget Amelina. I should add that we did not remain in touch, not even epistolary touch, because when I left I forgot to write down her address — a meaningful lapse. To tell the truth, I didn’t feel I had the right to love her. She was young enough to be my daughter, she studied literature, and she was innocent in a way that is difficult to describe. As for me, I was married, with children, dedicated to my secret scientific endeavors that forced me into Machiavellian contortions . . . What kind of future could we have? The opportunity passed, and by the same token, didn’t pass. Amelina’s love continued to reside within me and remained a constant source of inspiration. Now, upon my return, I thought of her . . . But Amelina didn’t appear. She was still living in the city, as I discovered by accident, and she must have read in the newspapers of my presence, but she kept her distance. She was avoiding me. I understood and accepted. Moreover, I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize her if I saw her again. A lot of time had passed, she’d probably gotten married . . .

  It was an old story, older than she was in reality. When I met Amelina, it was love at first sight, overwhelming, a whirlwind . . . This was because the current carried me way back, back to a time when I, too, had loved. By the time I met Amelina, I was already a grown man, I had lost almost all hope, I felt defeated, I believed nothing could bring back my lost youth. And nothing did, obviously. But when I saw Amelina, I miraculously recognized in her features, her voice, her eyes, a woman who had been my great passion when I was twenty. I had loved the beautiful Florencia to despair (ours was an impossible love) with all the madness of adolescence, and I never stopped loving her. It wasn’t meant to be, we took different paths, she got married, I did too, we lived in the same neighborhood, sometimes I saw her walk by with her children as they were growing up . . . Twenty years passed, thirty . . . She gained weight, that delicate and shy girl I had adored turned into a mature woman full of middle-class respectability . . . She must be a grandmother by now. How incredible! How life flies by! For the heart, time doesn’t pass.

  Florencia had been reborn, in all the splendor of her youth, in the sweet Amelina, whom I had had to cross a continent to find. I sensed their resemblance in the smallest of details, in the most intimate folds of their smiles, or of their dreams. The coincidence spanned a lifetime, and in the magical wonder it brought me, I found the justification for my work: during the years following my encounter with Amelina, my Great Work took off, embarked on a definitive direction, and I began to see the fruits of my labor. She was my Muse.

  All well and good. On Thursday afternoon, I was dozing in my lounge chair by the pool when suddenly something made me lift my head and look around. At first it didn’t seem like anything very special was going on: the few bathers who were often there at that time of day were quiet, some conversed in low voices, several children were playing in the water. In the sky: the omnipresent turkey vultures. Nevertheless, I could feel it: something was stirring in that uneventful calm . . . I knew I was in a prophetic state, as if possessed. What was about to happen was already happening. I leapt up, light and heavy at once, a statue made of floating metal, and walked over to the edge of the deck. On the other side of the pool, right in front of me, rose a living statue. I have never felt so naked. It was Amelina, larger than life (or smaller?), in subtle colors that seemed to have been gleaned from the noontime shadows. She looked at me. I understood that I was hallucinating because I saw her as she had been so many years before, almost a child who was discovering me with all the surprise of a romantic adventure. But she was real, or there was something real about her. There’s always something real in what happens, no avoiding that. But her skin tone was too strange, as was the light that outlined her figure, which seemed set apart from the atmospheric light. This was due, I noticed with amazement, to the fact that her figure projected no shadow onto the ground. Instantly, in a very rapid psychic sequence, I realized that I also had no shadow and that the sun had disappeared from the sky, which I confirmed when I raised my eyes. The perfectly blue sky of four o’clock in the afternoon, without a single cloud . . . had no sun. It had evaporated.

  I looked again at Amelina. Monumental transparent shapes in continual metamorphosis were rising from the water in the pool that separated us. I thought it was another Macuto Line, the one of dreams, the private . . .

  Suddenly, Amelina disappeared, the shapes melded into a horizontal wave, and the sun was once again shining in the sky. My shadow stretched out in front of me once again . . . My shadow, in every swimming pool in the Andes.

  I couldn’t help glancing up at the mountains in the vicinity of where I had left the cloning machine. That gesture had the virtue of returning me to reality. At least I could be sure that what was happening there was not a dream. No matter what strange paths my thoughts might take, the process would continue, independently of me, though subsequently I would take charge of it. That, however, would be a kind of epilogue; in itself, the Great Work consisted principally of me abstaining from all and every intervention, of achieving a parallel trajectory of absolute integrity.

  VI

  There is another coincidence on another level: that between the velocity of thought and thought itself. This is the same as saying that the Great Work — the creation of the individual — is exactly what is accomplished during a life span at that constant velocity. In a certain sense, velocity is the Great Work; confusion arises about the method. Thus, my Great Work, my secret labor, is highly personal, nontransferable, nobody but I could carry it out, because it consists of the innumerable psychic and physical instants whose sequence confirms my velocity. The velocity at which I unfold through time. By becoming an individual, my work allows me to love and be loved.

  The aforesaid occurred to me while I was considering, with amazement, the quantity of things that were happening to me while nothing was happening. I noticed this as my pen was moving: there were thousands of tiny incidents, all full of meaning. I’ve had to pick and choose carefully, otherwise the list would be endless. But it’s normal for more things to happen when you’re traveling than during the normal course
of habitual life. Not only because they actually happen because one is on the move and

  actively going out looking for things, but because our perceptions awaken when we leave our habits behind, we see more and hear more, we even dream more. For someone who travels as little as I do, for someone who leads such a routine life, a trip can make an enormous difference; it is the objective equivalent of cerebral hyperactivity.

  I am selecting, somewhat haphazardly, the facts I use to carry forward this story of the days I spent waiting while the cloning process was taking place at the top of the mountain, focusing exclusively on the translation possibilities. I should mention that the literary conference I had been invited to attend was taking place concurrently, but I was so detached from it I would not have been able to name even one of the subjects of its sessions and panel discussions. In one, however, I was a participant, and although this participation, fortunately, was passive and indirect, I had no choice but to know about it. It was a marginal activity, attendance optional, held outside the framework of the official sessions; it consisted of the staging of one of my plays by the University Theater Group of the Humanities Department. They had, apparently, already staged other plays of mine, and this time they had chosen one called In the Court of Adam and Eve. It was not the one I would have chosen, but I did not object when I saw it on the program they sent me months earlier. As soon as I arrived they asked me to attend the final rehearsals, approve the costumes and sets, meet the actors . . . I politely declined. I wished to be merely another member of the audience. That last statement was made out of a sense of obligation, for I didn’t care whether I saw it or not, and if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have gone; but it turned out to be true. As far as their request that I speak to the cast about my motivation for writing it, firmer reasons accompanied my refusal. The first one, I considered it inadvisable to explain; the others had to do with the amount of time that had passed since I’d written it, and how totally I had forgotten it. We left it at that, and though they were probably disappointed, they did not seem offended.

  Nevertheless, I did intervene on one point. The play would be performed for the general public in a newly built theater, but only those attending the conference would see the preview, and that performance could be held in a different venue, possibly in the open air, thereby taking full advantage of the climate. They asked my opinion, and in this case I felt I did have something to say. They expected me to come up with something unexpected and extravagant, so I chose the airport, which is right downtown because Mérida takes up the entire small valley in which it is situated. They liked that idea, got authorization, and made all the arrangements.

  The play dates back to my Darwinian period, but it foreshadows my subsequent work with clones. Within the entire body of my work, it is an exception: I have an aversion to what is now called “intertextuality,” and I never make literary allusions in my novels or plays. I force myself to invent everything; when the only choice is to recycle something that already exists, I prefer to take recourse in reality. But I allowed myself this exception because Genesis is a special case, even if only for its title. If inventiveness, or the transmutation of reality, is part of a broader mechanism of literary genetics, Genesis could well be considered the master plan, at least among us Westerners.

  Saying that this short play foreshadowed my subsequent scientific work is, to tell the truth, an understatement. The mere idea of Adam and Eve’s existence, of humanity (the species) retroactively reduced to a single couple, gives rise to genetics. I would even say that it is as far as the imagination can go in this field. Genetics is the genesis of diversity. But if diversity has nobody on whom to spread itself out, it turns on itself, gets tangled up in its own general particularity, and therein the imagination is born.

  I remember how one critic, at the play’s debut many years ago, called it “a beautiful love story.” In retrospect, I have found in that play the key to my difficulty in speaking about love other than through complex translations of perspectives. The coincidence of Adam with Eve in a world where it was unnecessary to seek each other out through the exhaustive labyrinths of the real is one theory of love. The passage from Adam to Eve under the guise of the fable of the rib was simply cloning. Once both characters were in the scene, cloning collapsed, decisively. The level of the fable guaranteed it would belong to an inaccessible past, a past that could only be captured through the imagination or through fiction. I believe that this myth is what turned the past into a mental construct; if not for its intercession, today we would perhaps be dealing with the past as simply one more reality, like any other object of perception.

  As it turned out, sex remained the only path to reproduction. Sex, and the concomitant maneuverings of love. The scenes with Adam and Eve occurred in such close proximity to cloning — of which they had been involuntary protagonists — that the fable contaminated their conjugal passion. To the same degree I had made sexuation a personal taboo, I approached them with the trembling of monstrous familiarity.

  I now begin to remember in greater detail the period of my life when I wrote that piece. I understand why I wanted to obscure it behind a cloud of voluntary oblivion, because it was a dark moment in my life, perhaps the worst, the most disturbed. My marriage had undergone some very demanding trials, I was obsessed with divorce, which, at the same time, seemed the only solution and caused me unendurable fear. I began to drink too much, and as my constitution is averse to alcohol, I began to develop rather grotesque symptoms; the worst was a contraction of my left leg, which began to behave as if it were eight inches shorter than my right; as far as I know, my two legs are exactly the same length, but for months I was going around with quite a conspicuous limp. This, on top of everything else, led me to take drugs (the only time in my life I’ve ever done so). I became addicted to proxidine and so severely abused it that I would have died of an overdose if I had not finally found a way out.

  Part of my recovery, in any case the testament to it, was the writing of this play. Which explains my use of a preexistent myth. This may seem like excessive justification for my falling into a literary trap I deplore, but so it goes, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Deep down, the marriage of Adam and Eve was the myth of absolute contingency: sex preceded and made possible by cloning; proxidine produced the same effect in my cells five times a day. But once everything reverted to literature, my recovery was complete.

  In another confluent episode, which memory now holds out to me in a gesture that seems to say, “There’s more where that comes from,” I had a kind of fleeting hallucination, though in the midst of so many perceptual changes brought about by my drug use, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Every time I closed my eyes I would see two men hurling themselves against each other, like two swordsmen, but without swords; I would see them in profile, sharply outlined, both dressed in black. The scene had very little depth, almost like an animated painting, but it was infused with a terrible level of violence.

  I would immediately open my eyes, and the scene would vanish. The hatred with which those two little optical men hurled themselves at each other filled me with horror. I couldn’t stand it, and so made them dissolve by popping open my eyes, reducing the scene to a quick sketch of an unarmed thrust. What happened next? I never found out, but perhaps one day I will.

  The performance was on Saturday, late afternoon. I cut short by a little — a very little — my session at the po
ol, showered, and took a brief nap. I went downstairs after they telephoned me to say that the bus was ready to leave. My colleagues, both men and women, were all dressed in their Sunday best, as if they were going to the opera. The young female students — conference volunteers — wore fancy outfits, and their dark, heavily made-up faces were crowned by high, elaborate hairdos, topped with silk bows. Two buses were waiting, as well as a long line of taxis and limousines. As always, we were running late. I got on the first bus, whose driver was impatiently honking the horn, and we shot off. To save time, we took the highway that circled the city, and the whole way I contemplated the view of the mountains through my window, absorbed in my own thoughts. If my calculations were correct, that very night the final gong would sound as my cloning machine completed its task and the Genius hatched from his shell. Creation’s integuments were undoubtedly already expanding. At dawn, the finished clone of Carlos Fuentes would be making its way down the mountain, and thus the final phase of my Great Work would commence.

  At the airport everything was ready for the show, which began as soon as the last invited guests arrived. Though they had reserved a seat for me in the front row, I preferred to watch it from further back, standing up, hidden — one could say — “in the wings,” that is, behind the plants, because the show was being staged in a garden surrounded by waiting gates, ticket counters, and the bar of the glass-enclosed pre-boarding area. It was a marvelous garden, though somewhat wild; at those latitudes it is difficult to keep vegetation under control. Bushes with flame-like flowers surrounded the palm trees, the banyan tree spread its eavelike branches in all directions, the fern fronds formed dense screens, and everywhere hung enormous yellow, violet, and blue orchids. The leaves of some of the plants were so large that one was enough for me to hide behind. I enjoyed spying on the audience. Everyone looked like automatons from the very heart of my experiments. I underwent some kind of doubling of the self. I thought: “If they were real, what would they be doing right now?” But the other part of me knew they were real. It was as if reality itself had switched time frames and one had leapt into another . . . Years ago, in this same place, I had seen Amelina for the last time, we’d said our final parting words, replete with tears and promises. This spot remained pregnant, like objective rapture. I realized I was looking for her but wouldn’t see her. How to see through the walls of the present? The garden’s exuberance, transparent in its repetition, was reflected in the buildings’ enormous panes of glass, and through those ghostly labyrinths passed the airplanes’ huge white forms.